Last-minute local shoppers traded their clunkers for cash

Last-minute shoppers trade their clunkers for cash on new cars as Stark County dealerships. Now the government needs to reimburse dealers hurting for cash.

G. Patrick Kelley

The Cash for Clunkers auto program almost ended in a crash Monday — a computer crash.

It was the end of a rewarding and frustrating time for many auto dealers, but that meant little to the shoppers looking for 11th-hour deals.

Carrie Matthews of Hartville was at the Waikem Hyundai dealership, negotiating for an Accent that has a combined city/highway rating of 29 miles per gallon.

Cash for Clunkers is the federal program that offered buyers rebates of $3,500 or $4,500 for trading in older cars for new, higher-mileage models. It’s a combination of economic stimulus and environmental stewardship.

For Matthews, the program enabled her to trade in her 1999 Ford Explorer, with 149,000 miles and gas mileage that is “not good.” She estimates it costs her $20 per round trip to Akron City Hospital, where she is a nurse.

“The money I’ll be saving in gas alone will pay for the car payment,” she said.

She was a last-minute shopper because didn’t think she qualified, but her brother called her late last week and told her, “I think you may have a clunker.”

She started shopping Saturday.

The Hyundai is a lot smaller than the Explorer, but that’s not a problem.

“My daughters are grown. They have their own cars,” she said. “They don’t need me to haul them around anymore.”

She said getting into a new car was just about a necessity. “My brother’s like, ‘You’ve got to get there today because I’m not fixing that Explorer one more time,’ ” she said.

CUTOFF POINT

The majority of area auto dealers cut off clunker deals last week, either because they were out of inventory or because they were worried that the government computer would cause processing problems — or both.

All deals were supposed to be completed and processed by 8 p.m. Monday. But by 4 p.m., the Car Allowance Rebate System (C.A.R.S. is the official name for the program) announced that dealers would have until noon Tuesday to get paperwork processed.

The 8 p.m. Monday was still the cutoff for sales.

“We cut it off last Thursday,” when the Monday deadline was announced, said Brad Black, owner of Downtown Ford Lincoln Mercury. He was worried about getting his deals processed.

“We’ve been trying to put deals in since last Friday,” he said. He has managed to get 72 of his 73 deals through the government’s Web site.

“We can’t even get in now,” he said Monday afternoon. “The computer’s crashed right now.”

Spitzer Chevrolet General Manager Kevin Spitzer said his dealership did one clunker deal Monday, but it was for a buyer who was there late Saturday. “We wanted to make sure that we got in all the ones we had done previously.

“The way things have gone, I didn’t want to take any chances.”

NEED FOR MPG

Christopher Weisent of Green was picking up a Hyundai Elantra on Monday that he bargained for at Waikem Saturday — his first day of shopping. The transmission went out on his 1999 Dodge Ram pickup that got about 9 miles per gallon, he said.

The Elantra gets mileage somewhere in the 30s, and Weisent said that will come in handy, “now that I’ve got a girlfriend in Cleveland.”

James Kling, executive director of the Greater Stark County Area Dealers Association, said the government’s handling of the programs was “crazy, plain and simple.

“The lifeblood of any dealership is cash flow,” he said. “If they can’t maintain it, they will sink and die.”

Because of delays in getting approvals, “dealers are in a world of hurt with this thing,” Kling said.

Chip Waikem said his family’s business still was making deals Monday “because we’re crazy. We sell cars. That’s what we do.”

His brother, Doug, said the business was waiting on $1.4 million in payments from the program. It has received about $100,000.

On the upside, he believes Waikem Motors, which carries the Hyundai, Kia, Honda and Subaru brands, set a dealership sales record for Stark County this month. The old mark was 170.

“We sold 254 and may end up at 300,” he said. “The program was a huge success at getting low-mileage cars off the road.”

TANGLED RED TAPE

But he said the program, “functionally, from the very beginning ... was a disaster” with computer problems and multiple rule changes that involved which cars qualified, title transfers, destruction of cars and the paperwork- submission process.

“The government couldn’t run a simple rebate program,” he said.

Dan Sanders, owner of Progressive Chevrolet and Progressive Dodge, ran out of qualified Dodge products, but was still making Chevrolet deals Monday afternoon.

“It’s crazy out here,” he said. “Our problem is the system is logjammed.”

Sanders said they managed to put three deals through and “tried a fourth, and we got blown out of the system.”

He has sold about 90 cars through the program and had been paid about $90,000 out of $600,000 to $700,000 owed.

The dealership was so busy Saturday that customers were given numbers and bottled water. “We didn’t have enough salespeople to handle it all,” he said. “I’ve never seen it like this.”

Black has been paid for only one of the 73 deals Downtown has made under the program.

“It was fun while it lasted,” he said.

Canton Repository

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.